News

World of Warcraft's Subscription Levels Take a Big Hit?

An article suggests that Blizzard's WoW subscription base has been nearly halved due to Chinese server downtime.

An entry on Tobold's MMORPG Blog suggests that Blizzard's worldwide World of Warcraft subscriptions are currently somewhere in the region of five million versus the previous figure of 11 million.

According to the post this is directly linked to the fact the more than half of the game's total subscriptions are based in China. Chinese WoW servers have been offline now for roughly one month, while Blizzard is attempting to transfer the game's license from The9 to NetEase.

The best guess is that the story started by Blizzard transfering their WoW license in China from The9 to NetEase. Obviously The9 wasn't happy to lose this major earner, and filed several lawsuits.

The new operator, NetEase, needs a license to run WoW. But the Chinese authorities didn't give NetEase a license, and "said that in order to protect the interests of domestic gaming enterprises, they would suspend review of all games belonging to foreign companies in the event of lawsuits or arbitration between foreign companies and Chinese companies". This could still go on for months!

Now financially this is less of a blow to Blizzard than it sounds. The Chinese players pay only about 6 cents per hour to play WoW, and most of that went to the Chinese operator, so in spite of China providing most of the players, it only provided a small part of the revenues and profits of Blizzard. Nevertheless the game being down for a month already certainly isn't good press, which is why Blizzard is keeping mum about it.

There are also rumors that the situation in China might not be rectified in the near future.

Chinese WoW-branded Coke. Also offline?

Bryn says: As the blog post suggests, this probably isn't a critical financial concern for Blizzard in the long run, as the number of players in China versus the revenue they generate with World of Warcraft is much less compared to Western players.

However, it also makes sense that Blizzard should be keen to resolve this issue sooner rather than later so that it can start bandying those impressive sub figures around again. As far as I'm concerned, the less spam regarding gold-selling the better. Thoughts?